Going Back to Old Places—Then Letting Them Go

Have you ever visited your past, years after you said goodbye?

I moved out of Los Angeles in July 2020—two-and-a-half years ago. And now, having changed in drastic ways, I am en route back.

It’s hard to fathom how much has happened and shifted since our New York-bound rented RV pulled out of our street in West Hollywood—our four animals, two of whom have since passed away, safely tucked in.

When I think back to that day, and the weeks and months leading up to it, it seems almost incomprehensible, not at all like it’s a memory rooted in my very own lived experience. I am endlessly flummoxed by how far away the past becomes, sometimes immediately after leaving it behind.

For years—maybe decades—I have been haunted by the unrelenting passing of time. And I know I’m not special in this way … I know we each have moments of poignant, maybe painful nostalgia.

As a memoirist, I go between finding it weird and amazing that at least some of those memories are forever memorialized in a book. Inside those covers, I will always exist just like that, and those who read the book will be none the wiser.

It’s like a time capsule, in a way—and as more and more months and years go by, I am equally fascinated by and estranged from the young woman who put those words and sentences and pages and chapters together because she had something to say.

And hats off to her for saying it. That was brave and badass, and I admire her for having the gumption to be publicly vulnerable.

But I’m not her anymore. Life is constantly a reinvention, and the cool thing is, we have no idea what will appear next or who we will become.

So we reinvent, we morph, we shape-shift. We decide who we are on any given day—and before we know it, before we’ve even broken in our shoes, that day is gone.

Though I’m heading to LA for a VegNews retreat, I’ll manage to find time to visit my old haunts in Hollywood, West Hollywood, and Koreatown. These spots will look eerily familiar, just as much as they will look entirely foreign. I wonder if the dandelion greens that Moore and I would forage from our yard are still defiantly poking through the sidewalk cracks. I wonder if anyone else forages them.

I realize that as much as I am no longer the person who foraged in Koreatown, I am also still exactly her. I am still exactly the girl in my memoir, too—the one who lived in the best little apartment in Soho and regularly walked over to Chinatown for the sweetest cherries around.

The thing about getting older is that there are more and more memories and moments that feel magically just within reach, yet, at the same time, are far, far away.

It’s not like I’m that old or anything, but the only way of making any sense of this is to commit to being firmly planted in the moment. Because pretty soon, that will be gone, too.

And I don’t mean that in some melancholic way. It’s actually quite liberating to give myself permission to stop worrying so much about what will come down the pipeline. Even though I fancy myself an amateur witch (and I have more tarot decks than I care to admit here), I know that no one can really predict the future (except maybe Tyler Henry).

It’s a very powerful realization—finally understanding what “they” meant when they said the only thing that really matters is right now. Before you know it, right now will become as foreign and far as that hot summer in Italy, that cold winter in the Catskills, that rainy fall in Santa Cruz, that stunning summer in Portland.

I realize, too, that as much as I am no longer the girl in the memoir, I am indeed still her. Or, should I say, she’s somewhere inside of me. Not to get too weird, but we’re like a nested Russian doll; she’s somewhere in there beneath a few more recent versions of myself. We’re protecting her. A future me—a bigger nesting doll—will do the same for me now.

My trip to LA will be profoundly meaningful, I am sure. I get to say thank you to the sprawling city that held me for a few years when I needed holding. Oof … I can already feel my heartstrings being tugged.

But I will not linger in those feelings for too long. I will not indulge that past part of me that is demanding attention. I will let it flow through me like the Genesee River, which sits beside my current home. I will breathe in and out, taking it and then letting it go.

As much as these places from our past are embedded in our muscle memory, they do not define us any more than our past itself. We can notice them, thank them, and then stay grounded in the here and now.

Because that is really the place that matters most.

xo,

jazz